Brazil’s national football stadium, the Estado Nacíonal, lies near the heart of the capital city of Brasília. The roof appears as a brilliant white ring in this photograph taken from the International Space Station. The stadium is one of Brasília’s largest buildings. Renovation began in 2010, and it is now the second most expensive stadium in the world after Wembley Stadium in London.

To accommodate World Cup fans visiting from all over the world, renovations were made to nearly all modes of transportation—particularly airports—in Brasília and other host cities. Brasília’s international airport is visible at lower right, on the far side of Lake Paranoá. (Note that the image is rotated so that north is to the left.)

Brasília is widely known for its modern building designs and city layout. Astronauts have the best view of the city’s well-known “swept wing” city layout, which takes the form of a flying bird that is expressed in the curves of the boulevards (image left). The stadium occupies the city center, between the wings.

Click here to view an image of the area taken in August 2010, about four months after renovation of the stadium began.

Astronaut photograph ISS040-E-5839 was acquired on May 28, 2014, with a Nikon D3S digital camera using an 800 millimeter lens, and is provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations Facility and the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, Johnson Space Center. The image was taken by the Expedition 40 crew. It has been cropped and enhanced to improve contrast, and lens artifacts have been removed. The International Space Station Program supports the laboratory as part of the ISS National Lab to help astronauts take pictures of Earth that will be of the greatest value to scientists and the public, and to make those images freely available on the Internet. Additional images taken by astronauts and cosmonauts can be viewed at the NASA/JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. Caption by M. Justin Wilkinson, Jacobs at NASA-JSC.